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Library is garden of blossoms

Mary Ellen McCarthy of Dracut adjusts an arrangement at the Dracut Garden Club s Books in Bloom exhibit at the Dracut Public Library. SUN/JULIA MALAKIE

DRACUT -- Any patron who enters the M.G. Parker Memorial Library through Friday will be greeted by the pleasant aroma of flowers and plants.

Members of the Dracut Garden Club have created several arrangements that are each tied to a book. There's an orchid in honor of "The Orchid Thief," a 1998 nonfiction book by Susan Orlean, and an arrangement with Provence lavender plants for "A Year in Provence" by Peter Mayle.

The arrangements are part of Books in Bloom, an event co-sponsored by the garden club and the library that runs through noon Friday. A variety of fiction and nonfiction books were previously set aside for the garden club members to read.

"We choose the titles that we want to do and we make some kind of an arrangement that resembles some of the topics within the book that we read," Mary Ellen McCarthy, vice president of the club and a Dracut resident.

On Wednesday evening, members of the Dracut Garden Club brought in their arrangements and gathered in the first-floor conference room to talk and make last-minute adjustments.

McCarthy said she thought a lot about her arrangement before piecing it together. For the event she read "The Kite Runner," The New York Times bestselling debut novel by Khaled Hosseini.

"What I chose to do was, since most of the story is based on what happened in Afghanistan, I tried to get a setting that would be more like the terrain of what Afghanistan would be," McCarthy said as she studied her arrangement.

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"I chose older, not yet flowering spirea and euonymus and things that were around home, easy to find: boxwood, geraniums."

Katie Wasylak, a Dracut resident, based her arrangement based on "A Year in Provence," a memoir by Peter Mayle about his first year in Provence, France.

"This is Provence lavender because they have a lot of gardens and they grow a lot of grapes for wine, so I got the wine bottle," Wasylak said as she poked around in the basket she chose to contain the plants and an empty wine bottle.

Kristin McCauley of Dracut stands with her arrangement inspired by the book "Lucia, Lucia" by Adriana Trigiani. SUN/JULIA MALAKIE

"I just love the flowers. They represent sunflowers."

There are jars beside each arrangement which are part of a free raffle, according to Mary Jo Baur, a member who has been filling in this week for the garden club's president, Kathy Gauthier. Patrons interested in winning an arrangement can put their names and contact information on a slip of paper and insert their information into a jar, and library staff will pick names and contact the winners so they can come and pick up their prizes.

"It's just a way to get the Dracut Garden Club's name out in the community," Baur said. "We hope that Dracut Garden Club will become better known in the community and that people will enjoy the arrangements."

The M.G.

Dracut Garden Club presented a Books in Bloom exhibit at Dracut Public Library. SUN/JULIA MALAKIE

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